Your mobile is the new high street

Mobile payments will change the face of shopping even more than the have
already. But how close are we to the tipping point?

The future: the high street on your mobilePhoto: Alamy

By Bill Ready, CEO of Braintree

7:00AM GMT 02 Mar 2014

As I headed off the plane on my most recent trip to London, I reserved a room at my favourite hotel in Soho with the HotelTonight app in less than 30 seconds. With just a single tap of a button once I hit baggage claim, my black cab from Hailo was waiting outside. On my way into the city, I used Seatwave to buy stalls tickets to a West End show, before firing up Blinkbox to catch the ending to a film I was watching in the air.

Was any of this possible five years ago? Three years ago? Not at all. But today it’s our reality. This shift to everything mobile, to embracing what technology can offer us - we call it the Smart Commerce movement, and it’s driving major behavioural shifts. Our smartphones have evolved from single-function devices to virtual personal assistants and as a result, the foundations of shopping and paying have begun to fundamentally change. New experiences like hands-free payments and order-ahead dinner with our devices will soon render wallets and plastic cards obsolete. In just a couple of years we’ve come to expect our apps - like Google Now and Spotify - to know our tastes and provide relevant, emotive experiences.

Braintree recognised this definitive shift to mobile technology early on. We bet big on mobile in the online world at a time when other companies were putting their chips on in-store mobile solutions like NFC and point of sale systems. We believed in developing solutions that address real pain points. Our focus has always been on creating effortless and fluid payment experiences and we’re proud that many of the most defining mobile commerce experiences use our platform.

And so as m-commerce rapidly becomes smarter, we’re seeing some major behavioural shifts:Shopping from a smartphone should be delightful. According to a recent comscore report, mobile now accounts for more than 50% of time spent on e-commerce. But a recent BrightEdge study says that, mobile users convert at one-third the rate of desktop users. Why? Largely because improvements to the checkout and payment process haven’t kept pace with those on the browsing side, when the interest and need for better mobile payments experiences clearly exist.

I believe we are at a tipping point. Consumers are beginning to expect a seamless shopping experience on mobile, and any point of friction - including typing in a credit card number - can mean a lost sale. It’s the businesses that not only optimise their mobile offering, but also make m-commerce an emotive and enjoyable process, that are going to succeed. Venmo Touch is an example of how technology can help merchants meet consumer’s expectations by developing entire networks of m-commerce businesses that can now accept payments with one touch.

In 2014, we’ll not only see an increase in the amount of time consumers spend shopping on mobile devices, but more importantly, we’ll see a dramatic increase in the percentage of mobile conversions, as more and more businesses create optimised mobile payment experiences.

In-store shopping is going mobile. More than 63% of consumers use their mobile device as a shopping aide in-store, according to a recent eConsultancy report. So far that activity has often been to price shop or buy from online retailers while standing in the showroom of a brick and mortar retailer. However, larger retailers are now aware of the new, modern consumer and they’re looking to mobile to help reach them with practical and engaging in-store experiences.

Though mobile payments in-store are in the early stages, technology will be one of the ways that retailers will be able to offer their customers experiences that keep them coming back. PayPal, for example, is pioneering new ways to pay that solve real pain points for consumers, such as ordering ahead so your lunch is ready when you get to the restaurant, letting you skip the queue.

This year we will see consumers becoming more and more familiar with using their mobile devices to both shop and buy in the store. Retailers will begin to create in-store experiences that delight consumers and make sure that when consumers use their mobile devices to buy in their stores it is actually a purchase with them and not an online retailer.

For as long as we’ve had smartphones, they’ve been gathering information about our interests. Mine knows exactly where I am at all times, which lunch spots I frequent, my favourite coffee, recent purchases and even upcoming travel plans. That’s a massive amount of contextual data, and soon our phones will be able to offer us concierge-like experiences, unprompted.

Shopping will become a highly personalised, context-driven and ubiquitous experience, one that is facilitated by the simple press of a button.